Many business organizations have found that the importance and volume of business-critical records is rapidly increasing. Because of this, many companies are reevaluating their unstructured data strategy and are turning toward more reliable records management policies. “Records management” is the systematic and comprehensive control of the creation, capture, maintenance, filing, use, and disposition of records. Records management aims to ensure that records contained in a database are authentic and reliable, can be retrieved when needed as quickly and efficiently as possible, and are not destroyed prematurely or kept longer than required. A “record” is any data item (recorded information) that is under records management control and subject to a life cycle. A record's life cycle refers to the events happening to the record during its life span, from its creation or receipt to its final disposition. A record's life cycle is often described in three stages: creation, maintenance and use, and final disposition. A set of retention rules/policies are applied to the record over a defined time period.
Conventional database systems store data in the form of records or rows. Each row includes one or more related item(s) of information. For example, a row can include the date, number, amount and customer for an order. Certain groups of rows are organized into tables. For example, an Orders table can include all of the rows describing the characteristics of orders that have been received. Users of database systems manipulate and extract information from the tables and rows that make up the system. Such requests are conventionally referred to as queries. Queries can range in complexity from a request for the display of the information in a particular row, to an accumulation of data regarding rows and tables that comprise terabytes of information. Users of database systems also insert, delete, and update the information stored in the tables and rows.